Craft beer fans across the Eastern Shore are gearing up for the sixth annual “99 Bottles of Beer on the Lawn” festival, set for Saturday, May 12, at Southern Napa in Daphne. The event, which runs from 1 to 4 p.m. rain or shine, has grown into one of the area’s signature spring gatherings since it began in 2013, drawing beer lovers from across Baldwin County and beyond to a lawn that turns into the Eastern Shore’s biggest tasting room for one afternoon each May.
Southern Napa, a converted farmhouse situated between U.S. Route 98 and Main Street, has built a reputation as a destination for fine wine and craft beer selections that are often hard to find elsewhere in the region. What began as a specialty retail shop has become a meeting point for the Gulf Coast’s beer and wine community, and the lawn festival is the clearest expression of that role.
Owners Jim and Carrie Cox opened the shop in 2012, just as changes to Alabama’s brewing laws were beginning to fuel a wave of new craft breweries across the state. The timing was fortunate: consumers who had been drinking mass-market lagers were suddenly being offered locally brewed IPAs, stouts and Belgian-style ales, and retailers who stocked them well became the guides for a new generation of drinkers. The following year, the couple launched the lawn festival as a way to introduce craft beer to a wider audience, and it has since become their marquee annual event.
How the festival works
This year’s festival will once again set up a large tent on the lawn outside Southern Napa, with 99 or more craft beers available for tasting. A $35 ticket includes a souvenir tasting glass and samples of every beer on site — a format that turns the afternoon into a choose-your-own tour through styles, breweries and regions, from familiar favorites to releases most attendees will not have seen on store shelves.
Attendees are encouraged to vote in several award categories for their favorites, giving the event a bit of competitive stakes beneath the picnic atmosphere. Bottles and cans of most featured beers will be available for purchase inside the shop, and festivalgoers can also place orders online ahead of time to pick up on their way out — a detail that reflects the shop’s retail roots and turns a tasting afternoon into a stocking-up trip for regulars.
Live music from Brett LaGrave will play throughout the afternoon, and food will be available from Chef Will Hughes’ food truck, so the festival operates as a full afternoon out rather than a strict tasting exercise. The rain-or-shine format has proven necessary on the Gulf Coast, where a May afternoon can turn from blue skies to downpour without much warning; the big tent and the shop itself keep the event viable in either case.
Jim Cox described the festival as less a formal tasting event and more of a relaxed neighborhood gathering. “It’s a craft beer festival, but it’s really more like a big lawn party with family and friends,” he said, adding that the event is designed to be approachable for newcomers who may not yet know what styles of beer they like. “If you don’t like a particular beer you try at this event, it’s pretty easy to just dump it on the lawn and move on.”
That low-stakes approach is deliberate, and it explains the festival’s durability. Beer tastings can intimidate — the vocabulary of hops, malt and barrel aging alone can scare off the curious — but a lawn party needs no prerequisites. For more serious enthusiasts, Cox said, the festival also offers the chance to sample rare and hard-to-find releases side by side, which is something no single bottle shop visit can replicate. The design serves both audiences at once: novices wander and taste, while regulars work from a list.
Why Daphne, and why now
The festival’s home matters to its character. Daphne sits on the Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay, connected to Mobile by the U.S. 98 causeway and the Interstate 10 bridge across the bay, and its Old Town district around Main Street has spent years cultivating exactly the kind of walkable, locally owned retail scene that Southern Napa anchors. A festival on a lawn between Main Street and the highway draws shoppers who might otherwise never find the shop.
The timing is a product of Alabama’s changing beer laws. For most of the state’s modern history, archaic rules capped alcohol content, banned larger bottles and kept most craft breweries out. The gradual lifting of those restrictions — beginning with the so-called Gourmet Beer Bill of 2009 that raised the allowed alcohol content and permitted larger formats — opened the Alabama market to the strongest craft brands in the country and made it possible for brewers to open here. The effects rolled across the decade that followed: taprooms in Birmingham, Huntsville and Mobile, and a retail channel of shops like Southern Napa that stocked what supermarkets would not.
By the time the Coxes opened in 2012, the wave was building, and homebrewing’s legalization in 2013 added a pipeline of hobbyists turning professional. Each spring since, “99 Bottles” has functioned as a local barometer of the industry — the lineup grows broader each year, and the crowd’s questions have shifted from “what is craft beer?” to which new Alabama brewery is worth watching.
What it means for the Eastern Shore
Events like this one have become economic engines for Old Town Daphne and towns like it. A festival that fills a lawn for an afternoon fills neighboring shops and restaurants for a weekend, and it markets the district to people who live ten minutes away but rarely cross the causeway for anything but commuting. The Coxes’ formula — specialty retail plus an annual event plus a relaxed public face — has become a template that other Baldwin County merchants study.
A sixth year, and what’s changed
Six years in, the festival has become a tradition with its own rhythms. Regulars know to arrive early, to wear shoes they don’t mind dumping beer on, and to bring a cooler for the bottles they buy on the way out. The souvenir glass has become a collector’s item of sorts, and the voting categories have turned casual attendees into participants with opinions about which hazy IPA deserved the crown.
The beer landscape behind the tent has changed even faster. In the festival’s first year, “99 bottles” required assembling whatever the national craft market offered and whatever Alabama law allowed. Six years later, the state’s own breweries supply a meaningful share of the lineup, Gulf Coast breweries have followings of their own, and styles that were once exotic — sours, barrel-aged stouts, New England IPAs — are standard expectations. The festival’s growth tracks the industry’s almost exactly.
It also tracks the audience. Baldwin County’s population has been among the fastest-growing in Alabama, fed by transplants who arrived from craft-beer-saturated markets elsewhere and expected to find the same options on the Eastern Shore. Southern Napa’s shelves — and the lawn party’s lineup — are partly an answer to that expectation, and the shop’s willingness to special-order and pre-sell reflects a customer base that knows what it wants.
The practical details
For anyone planning to attend, the essentials are simple. The festival runs Saturday, May 12, from 1 to 4 p.m. at Southern Napa, rain or shine, on the lawn between U.S. Route 98 and Main Street in Daphne. Tickets are $35 and include the souvenir tasting glass and samples across more than 99 beers; food from Chef Will Hughes’ food truck and music from Brett LaGrave run through the afternoon. Voting in the award categories is open to all attendees, and purchases inside the shop — or online orders placed ahead of time for pickup — let visitors take the afternoon’s discoveries home.
The sensible advice from past attendees is the same every year: eat beforehand, pace the samples, and treat the afternoon as a survey rather than a sprint. With 99 or more beers on offer, nobody tastes the whole lawn — and as Jim Cox likes to point out, dumping what you don’t like and moving on is part of the point.
Why it endures
The festival’s formula sounds easy to copy — a tent, some tables, a few dozen kegs — but the parts that make it work are the parts that take years to build: relationships with distributors that put rare bottles on the table, a customer list that buys tickets in advance, a lawn and a shop in the right location, and owners who treat the event as a party they are hosting rather than a product they are selling. Six years in, “99 Bottles of Beer on the Lawn” has become the Eastern Shore’s spring ritual for beer drinkers, and the shop that started as a converted farmhouse wine store has become the unlikely center of Baldwin County’s craft beer scene.